Payments

53/1126 → 11/757; -3.25 percentage points of formation share.

What's notable about this batch is how many of the eleven companies are not really "payments" plays in the traditional infrastructure sense but attempts to route around slow, expensive rails using stablecoins, with Consul, BlindPay, and Infinite all building on-chain payout or transfer rails aimed at cross-border money movement. That overlaps directly with "Cross-Border Payments," which is growing even slower at 0.26x, and with "Crypto / Web3" at 0.24x, suggesting the slowdown here is not isolated to one niche but shared across the rails these companies actually depend on. Meanwhile "Neobank" is growing at 4.31x and "Emerging Market" at 1.72x, both far outpacing this formation despite being the exact markets companies like Infinity, Miden, and Moreta are chasing, which points to a split: demand for banking-like services in underserved regions is accelerating while the payments infrastructure layer underneath it cools. The live investigations point to a related shift already underway inside a few of these companies, particularly Blaze, whose framing as an "AI CFO" anticipates a world where agents themselves need delegated budgets, exception handling, and durable transaction identity across bank, card, and stablecoin rails rather than a human simply approving a wire. That kind of agent-native payment control only became a plausible product category after 2023, once large language models were reliably capable of initiating and reasoning about multi-step financial actions rather than just summarizing them. The gap between a cooling payments category and an accelerating neobank category suggests investors are rewarding the customer-facing financial relationship over the plumbing beneath it, even as that plumbing is what has to change for stablecoin-based payouts and cross-rail reconciliation to actually work at scale.

No comparable outside activity is connected yet.

These share a word with “Payments” but are tracked as separate categories. The real overlap below is the actual share of Payments’s companies also found in that category — not a guess.